Collective Intelligence Creates the Problem, Individual Intelligence Solves It

Nora Isack

In Steven Johnson’s The Myth of the Queen Ant, he observes that ant colonies follow rules; they “put the dead ants as far as possible, and put the midden as far away as possible without putting it near the dead ants” (Johnson 250). The ants’ instinct for survival leads to the organization of their colony and the rules that keep garbage and dead bodies separate from the rest of the colony. Humans, too, follow instinctual rules when building communities. The ideal locations of Manchester and Varanasi are not merely coincidental. Johnson describes that Manchester is “situated at the confluence of the Medlock and Irwell Rivers, on the northwestern edge of modern England, about 150 miles from London” (Johnson 251). This ideal location made it “the very center of a technological and commercial revolution that…irrevocably [altered] the future of the planet” (Johnson 251). Alexander Stille’s The Ganges’ Next Life, depicts the city of Varanasi, India situated along the Ganges River as the center of the Hindu religion and “the holiest city in India” (Stille 538). Sadly, Varanasi’s poor sewage system and the Hindu rituals have turned the river into a biohazard, and “not surprisingly, waterborne illnesses—hepatitis, amebic dysentery, typhoid, and cholera—are common killers” (Stille 539). In Malcolm Gladwells’ The Power of Context, he asserts that “the impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment” (Gladwell 182). Gladwell’s theory explains that people’s behavior follows patterns by reacting to the minor aspects of the environment; the catalysts for patterns of behavior, or “Tipping Points.” He declares that crime in New York City is caused by the physical conditions of the city. In New York City, Varanasi, and Manchester patterns emerge based on man’s instinct to follow social rules and for survival.  Like Johnson describes, there is a collective intelligence, created by these patterns, that fosters the overall self-organization of a community, “a global order built out of local interactions” (Johnson 255). Yet, it is these patterns that create problems, such as crime and pollution, in communities. The situations that Gladwell and Stille present complicate Johnson’s theory because reform does not take place naturally; individual intelligence is needed.

Like the ant colonies described by Johnson, cities become “self-organizing systems” as a result of the rules, both social and religious, followed by individuals to form a “collective human behavior” (Johnson 251). Describing the city of Manchester, Johnson states, “You don’t need regulations and city planners deliberately creating [buildings]. All you need are thousands of individuals and a few simple rules of interaction” (Johnson 255). Gladwell presents Zimbardo’s mock prison at Stanford University that supports Johnson’s theory on a smaller scale. In this experiment individuals were selected and then randomly chosen to be either guards or prisoners. Because of the “few simple rules of interaction” of a prison, the individuals quickly assumed their supposed roles. Gladwell describes that “the guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians” (Gladwell 188). The experiment was designed to “find out why prisons are such nasty places,” and the results show that there is something instinctual that influences the behavior of these people given the jail situation (Gladwell 188). One prisoner said, “No matter how together I thought I was inside my head, my prisoner behavior was often less under my control than I realized” (Gladwell 189). The individuals involved in the mock prison followed a pattern in society—they spontaneously acted the way they felt they were supposed to in a prison environment. This pattern of behavior kept order within the small community of the prison, just as an organization was created in Manchester to maintain order in the town. An organization formed that follows a pattern—“the bright shop windows attract more bright shop windows and drive the impoverished toward the hidden core” (Johnson 255). Shops were built next to other shops and people of the same economic class lived together, and this was all by “accident” (Johnson 253). The people followed social rules, by sticking with others of the same class, and this created the organization of Manchester. Along the Ganges River in Varanasi there, too, is a pattern that creates order in the lives of the Hindus. In Varanasi, there are “thousands of individuals and a few simple rules of interaction;” the rules arise from the Hindu religion and create a daily pattern among the Hindus.It is “the tug of these traditions, some of which go back three thousand years, to the founding of Varanasi, the holiest city in India, pulls Mishra to the river despite having suffered a broken thigh” (Stille 538). The religious rules have individuals performing rituals in the Ganges. Similar to what happened in the town of Manchester (people of the same classes living together), people of the same religion have developed a shared culture along the Ganges. In a mock prison or a city, people instinctually follow “rules of interaction” form a pattern and develop into the community’s organization.

In a population, each individual’s behavior combines to form one overall behavior and the “self-organization” of a city. Johnson further explains that “organized complexity…is like [a] motorized billiards table, where the balls follow specific rules and through their various interactions create a distinct macrobehavior, arranging  themselves in a specific shape, or forming a specific pattern over time” (Johnson 260). The circumstances of India “over time” have influenced the pollution of the river. It is the sewage system, created by the British before “their departure in 1947” (Stille 549), that causes “a hundred and fourteen cities [to] dump their raw sewage directly into the river (Stille 539). Each “ball,” or person, participates in the religion and performs the rituals; “white-bearded ascetics raise their emaciated arms to salute the sun god; housewives in bright-colored saris toss garlands of marigolds to Mother Ganges, the river goddess; adolescent boys in G-strings do pushups, flex their muscles, and wash their bodies; naked children splash in the water; and families carry their dead to the ‘burning ghats’ to cremate them and scatter their ashes on the river” (Stille 538). This pattern of behavior has increased the pollution of the Ganges. This “specific pattern over time” forms the “macrobehavior” along the Ganges River and creates the complex pollution problem of the Ganges River. Just as a religious environment promotes a specific type of behavior, the grimy conditions of the subways foster criminal behavior. The New York subway system can also be compared to the “motorized billiards table” where people “follow a specific pattern.”The behavior of criminals in the subways is the result of the dirty environment. Gladwell explains, “This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious—just as a fashion trend is contagious—that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community. The Tipping Point in this epidemic…[is] something physical like graffiti” (Gladwell 182). The dirty environment causes individuals to “conclude that no one cares and that no one is in charge” generating a pattern of criminal behavior (Gladwell 182). It is the “macrobehavior,” or combined behavior, of individuals in Varanasi and New York City has created the problems of crime and pollution “over time.” 

According to Johnson, the problems in society will naturally be fixed by the population; cities “appear to have a life of [their] own” (Johnson 255). Johnson believes that collective intelligence causes a city to evolve and reform. In society the government, or the community’s leaders, is called upon to fix the problems. However, the government, like any other population, is subject to the patterns of social rules. The governments in Varanasi and New York City can be compared to the individuals involved in the Good Samaritan experiment examined by Gladwell. During this experiment “the words, ‘Oh, you’re late’ had the effect of making someone who was ordinarily compassionate into someone who was indifferent to suffering—of turning someone, in that particular moment, into a different person” (Gladwell 192). These individuals, when confronted with a problem, “a man slumped in an alley, head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning,” were overcome by social rules (Gladwell 191). Instead of taking a minute to help the hurt man, they hurried past him to get to their appointment on time. Subconsciously, the social rule of being on time took over their compassion. The government, too, overlooks things when searching for solutions to a problem because of rules it naturally feels obliged to follow. The government of India has implemented many solutions to the Ganges River problem. The “adopted Western waste-treatment technology” was put into the river “without considering the radically different ways that people use the rivers in India” (Stille 545). The government’s solutions were built with haste; trying to quickly fix the solution and incorporate Western ideas, they did not consider the environment. It was assumed that Western technology would fix the problem. The government has “made such blunders” and along the Ganges River “it is like a theme park of failed technology” (Stille 545). When the New York City Transit Authority was searching for solutions to crime in the subways, “many subway advocates” believed that “worrying about graffiti at a time when the entire system was close to collapse [seemed] as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the Titanic as it headed toward the icebergs” (183). The government overlooked the importance of a clean environment in the crime epidemic; it got caught up looking for bigger things. Like the individuals in the Good Samaritan experiments, the government means well. However, the government, like any other group of people, can get caught up in social rules and focus on the wrong things.

 In the disasters of the Ganges River pollution and the New York City crime epidemic, individuals are the ones who find solutions. Varanasi has been formed by patterns of its inhabitants. The rules of the Hindu religion call for bathing and corpse disposal rituals. This religious organization, along with the sewage system, has resulted in a fecal-coliform count that is “a terrifying three hundred and forty thousand times the acceptable level” (Stille 539). The problems have been created by the patterns of the entire community, and not even the government has come up with a successful solution. It has taken the ideas of two individuals to devise solutions. Veer Bhadra Mishra, as a spiritual leader and his knowledge of the dangerous situation of the river, has devoted himself to saving the Ganges River. Mishra’s collaboration with William Oswald, a professor of engineering, has found “a kind of ‘back to future’ approach to modern urban waster, called Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond Systems, in which sewage is treated in a carefully engineered series of natural algae ponds” (Stille 541). This solution fits both the physical and religious environment along the Ganges River; “there is a curious parallel between Oswald’s descriptions of the self-sustaining ecology of a pond system and certain traditional Hindu beliefs about the fundamental nature of the universe” (Stille 550). Just as it has taken individual intelligence to find a solution to the Ganges River, it required individuals at the New York City Police Department to find solutions to improve the subway conditions. It was David Gunn, of the police department, who insisted graffiti was something worth considering as a problem. To him “the graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system” (Gladwell 183). It was Gunn who “drew up a management structure and a precise set of goals and timetables aimed a cleaning the system line by line, train by train” (Gladwell 183). This solution removes the Tipping Points that incited such tragedies as the Bernie Goetz incident, where Goetz reacted violently to a confrontation by several youths. Gunn and Mishra and Oswald were able to find solutions to the problems developed from the patterns of behavior within cities.

Johnson presents Manchester as the epitome of self-organization. However, in Manchester, too, the government was called upon for help. Johnson describes that at first Manchester “was run like a feudal estate, with no local government to speak of—no city planners, police, or public authorities” (Johnson 251). The natural patterns of human behavior made Manchester “where civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage” (Johnson 252). The collective intelligence of the town’s population was able to follow patterns that organized the city (by economic class, etc.), but it wasn’t until Manchester sent representatives to Parliament that “the newly formed borough council finally began to institute public health reforms and urban planning” (Johnson 252). Still, while the government was beneficial, the city remained “the entrance to hell” (Johnson 252). Johnson, himself, introduces “the British polymath Alan Turing,” an individual who examined the city (Johnson 256). “It was in Manchester that Turing began to think about the problem of biological development in mathematical terms” (Johnson 256). It was the individual intelligence of Turing, and his attempt to understand Manchester and its emergent behavior, that led to his collaboration with Shannon. Together, their “attempts to build automated machines that could recognize patterns in audio signals or numerical sequences” allowed them “[to glimpse at] a future populated by even more intelligence machines” (Johnson 258). The intelligence of these individuals has led to artificial intelligence that can be “trained to recognize letters, without knowing anything about the alphabet in advance” (Johnson 263). Like humans, this artificial intelligence is able to recognize patterns. This concept of patterns is being explored to further man’s understanding of instinctual behavior. Johnson explains that “the great central concerns of the biologist…are now being approached not only from above, with the broad view of the natural philosopher who scans the whole living world, but also from the underneath, by the quantitative analyst who measures the underlying facts” (Johnson 260).  Gladwell would agree that it is the small details of the environment, the things “underneath,” that must be examined to understand patterns of behavior. The little things influence each individual of a population and create one overall trend. This self-organization happens naturally in the cities examined by Johnson, Gladwell, and Stille. Yet when these patterns of behavior create problems, such as crime and pollution, the group intelligence is not enough to fix the problem. Individual intelligence is what recognizes the flaws in the instinctual behavior of humans and finds solutions.